


Fate Goes Down Easier With Wine

by Selkit



Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol, Female Friendship, Gen, Late Night Conversations, Making Up, Post-Canon Fix-It, Psychological Trauma, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-03
Updated: 2016-10-03
Packaged: 2018-08-19 09:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8200084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Selkit/pseuds/Selkit
Summary: do u think i was supposed to die down there? in the mines?

  ...What the hell? Are you seriously texting me this at 3:00 in the morning?





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sumi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sumi/gifts).



> I discovered this game a few months ago and have been obsessing over it ever since, so naturally I decided to check out last year's Yuletide requests to see if any caught my eye. This one did! I love both Jess and Em and their catfight was my least favorite part of the game, so I've been wanting to fix it ever since. This fic isn't an _exact_ match to Sumi's prompts, but I hope it's close enough to still be enjoyable, if they're still in the fandom.

If she closes her eyes and concentrates really hard, Jess can almost remember what it was like to sleep for more than one uneasy hour at a time. She doesn’t do that much, though. She’s not a big fan of closing her eyes, these days.

She rolls over in bed and grabs her phone from beneath the adjacent pillow, squinting at the display. 3:03 am. Seven minutes later than the last time she checked. The screen’s glare drowns out the gentle glow from the string lights hung along her ceiling’s borders, and her thumb moves to toggle the off switch.

Instead, it presses the text balloon icon, makes a practiced scroll through her mile-long list of contacts until it lands on the most familiar one. 

_do u think i was supposed to die down there? in the mines?_

She stares blearily at the words as she types them, trying to focus on the cursor’s innocent little blink. She probably shouldn’t press _send_ , but she shrugs and does it anyway. She’s too tired to care, and Emily probably blocked her number long ago, besides. She imagines her text bouncing around in the online ether, trying to make it through and failing every time. A question forever prevented from being answered. 

There’s something kinda poetic about that, she thinks with a vague smile, turning the phone off and tossing it down on her pile of mangled sheets. At least, given what little she can remember from the English classes that never held her attention. 

She pulls the comforter over her shoulder and stares up at the string lights until they blur into hazy little smears of gold. She’s almost convinced herself to close her eyes when the phone buzzes, shocking her through the sheets. She snatches it up, juggling it in nerveless fingers until she can finally hold it steady enough to read the message. 

_What the hell? Are you seriously texting me this at 3:00 in the morning?_

She has one sluggish moment of surprise that Emily hasn’t blocked her number after all, then it passes, her brain too worn out to maintain an emotion longer than five seconds.

_sorry. i figured u weren’t sleeping either._

This time she doesn’t turn the phone off, watching the three little dots across the bottom of the screen instead. She imagines Emily’s perfectly manicured nails furiously clacking on the screen like birds trying to claw through a picture window.

_I didn’t say I was asleep._

A pause, then the three dots pop up again.

_Ugh. Give me twenty minutes._

It’s more like thirty minutes before Jess hears the sound of tires crunching on gravel, but she isn’t really counting. She slips downstairs and toggles off the burglar alarm, slides the deadbolt off, stands in the hallway with her arms wrapped around herself and her pajama pants askew on her hips. She probably should have at least run a brush through her hair, but if she’s honest with herself, she wasn’t really sure Emily was actually going to come.

“Oh my _God_ ,” is the first thing Emily says when she stalks through the door, stiffly, like the door insulted her mother. “You look beyond awful. Here.” She thrusts her arms out, pushing a wrapped package into Jess’s hands with a brusque shove. “You need these, like, _desperately_.”

Jess peels the packaging back, peering down at the wine coolers inside. Most of them are wild berry or peach flavored–Emily’s favorites–but she sees a few black cherry coolers, too. The kind she likes the most. 

She smiles, just a little, but it feels good in a tentative sort of way.

Emily is already winding her way upstairs toward Jess’s bedroom, and Jess follows, popping open one of the coolers and letting it flow quick and sweet down her throat. Half the bottle’s gone by the time she joins Emily cross-legged on the haphazard mess of sheets atop her bed.

“So,” Emily says. “You wish you’d died on that godforsaken mountain, huh?”

There’s a growl beneath the words. She snags one of the peach coolers, narrowing her eyes at Jess over the rim.

“It’s not so much that I _wish_ I’d died,” Jess says, though sometimes, in her darkest 4:00 am thoughts, she does wish exactly that. It would’ve been so much easier. “I guess it’s more that I’m wondering…you know, whether I should have.”

She slides her gaze up to meet Emily’s eyes. Emily makes a throaty, exasperated sigh, waving her bottle in a _get on with it already_ gesture.

“Becauuuuse?” she drawls.

“I dunno. I guess…” Jess tilts her head back on her shoulders, willing the oncoming tears to slip right back inside their ducts. She will not cry in front of Emily, dammit. “Karma, you know? Because I was the one who had the idea to prank Hannah. Or maybe, like, natural selection.” She laughs, bitterly. “You know, the Darwin Award or something. I’m basically too stupid to pass my genes on to the next generation, so I might as well get taken out before I do.”

“Mmf.” Emily tosses back another mouthful of peach cooler. “So I guess that means Mike hasn’t knocked you up yet, huh?”

It’s a barb, but Jess seizes onto it without hesitating. At least this is easier to talk about. “Oh God, no. We still haven’t even had sex yet. Like, at all.”

Emily tries to act casual, but Jess doesn’t miss her eyebrows rocketing up before she covers it with an eyeroll. “Yeah, right,” she says.

“I’m serious.” Jess polishes off her bottle. “We’ve fooled around a couple times since, uh, that night, but it never goes anywhere. I think neither of us can forget that…thing crashing through the window. At this point I’m pretty sure it’s never happening, so, if you want him back…” She shrugs, flips a wad of tangled hair over her shoulder. “He’s all yours.”

It’s her turn to be taken a little off guard when Emily barks out a harsh laugh, showing all her teeth like an angry rottweiler. “Seriously? Get back with the guy who almost shot me in the face? Yeah, no, I think I’m gonna pass on _that_ particular prize. But thanks anyway.”

“Wait, what?” Jess goes cold in a way that has nothing to do with the chilled wine churning in her belly. “Almost shot you in the face? What?”

“Oh, you haven’t heard that part of the story?” Emily lurches forward, sinking her fingers into the collar of her shirt, yanking it down to reveal a bite mark across her shoulder, throbbing ugly red and far too large to be from human teeth. “I got this, and Mister Big Hero Man decided that to protect the rest of the group, it would be a good idea to make a preemptive strike or some bullshit. Just on the off chance I might turn into one of _them_.”

Jess tries to swallow, but her mouth is all shriveled up. “But you’re…well, you’re still…alive?”

“Yeah, I guess he couldn’t make himself pull the trigger.” Emily rips the top off another cooler, savagely. “That doesn’t even begin to excuse it, though. You know, I figured Sam or someone would have told you all this stuff by now.”

“Yeah, well.” Jess looks off to the side. No reason to say she hasn’t been able to make herself take any of Sam’s calls. Not when Sam still just seems so strong and put together and _fine_. “God, that’s just…I can’t believe I’ve been messing around with a guy who almost killed you.”

Emily’s face turns to stone, the skin around her mouth puckering. “Sure. I’d think that would make him _more_ attractive to you, not less.”

“Emily!” For a second, Jess is pretty sure she’s going to throw up. She presses both hands to her abdomen, tasting the backlash of black cherry mixed with bile. “Look, we had a stupid fight over a guy. That doesn’t mean I want you _dead_.”

A long silence falls. Jess takes deep breaths until the nausea subsides. She listens to the liquid sloshing around in Emily’s bottle, then disappearing down her throat.

“Yeah,” Emily finally says, so low Jess can barely hear it. “I don’t really want you dead, either. I guess.”

She glances up, and her expression turns fierce in the muted light. “So cut it out with that ‘oh, I should have died in the mines’ moping, all right? Seriously, it’s a load of crap.” 

Jess manages a smile. “You think?”

“I don’t just think, I _know_. I was down there for hours, too. I know what it takes to make it through that.” Emily stretches her legs out on the bed and smirks. “And you know what else? Michael is like, the actual _worst_ in bed, so you’re not missing anything on that score.”

Jess stares at her, a strange bubbly sensation working its way up her throat. For a second she thinks the wine coolers are threatening to come up again, until she realizes it’s something else altogether: laughter.

It starts as a giggle, then grows bigger and louder until it’s almost a guffaw, spilling out of her until she can’t stay upright and tips over to land face-first on a discarded pillow. She looks up through the matted hair strewn over her face, and sees that Emily’s laughing, too. 

And for just one moment, everything feels almost normal again.


End file.
